• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Attachment, Trauma, and the Vicissitudes of Love: Circularity in Julio Medem’s Lovers of the Arctic Circle SILVIA M. BELL Abstract: Circularity, a salient theme in the film Lovers of the Arctic Circle (1999), is explored as a symbol that points to a consideration of issues central to psychic life. The movie sets up an expectation—two lives will be brought together to recreate a former blissful union, and complete a circle that defies finality, separation, and loss. It succeeds in creating a dialectic between two tensions, the experience of separateness where each person is a circle unto oneself, and the longing to be encircled with an “other” in a union that prom- ises safety and permanence. The wish for fusion versus merger with the loved one is discussed in the context of traumatic loss and soul blindness. These early experiences interfere with healthy mourning and determine the reliance on magic and regressive compromise that contributes to a tragic outcome. Keywords: attachment, fantasy, fusion, merger, mourning, separateness, soul blindness, trauma In his landmark paper, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905), Freud proffers an important insight into the psychology of love. The child’s relation to his mother is “the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an ob- ject is in fact a refinding of it” (ibid., 222). Developmental thrust propels the child toward individuation, but love is a force that aims “to restore the happi- ness that has been lost” (ibid., 222). The intensity of the longing, the quality of “subjection” to and idealization of the loved one bespeak of an exclusivity that mirrors the earliest attachment experience. While Freud speaks of re-finding an object to restore happiness, later psychoanalytic writers have expanded this view. “Lovers do not simply and repetitively re-find infantile objects, but seek objects who can undo the wounds and humiliations experienced early in life at the hands of their infantile objects, with the outcome of love depend- Projections Volume 1, Issue 1, Summer 2007: 75-90 © Berghahn Journals doi: 10:3167/proj.2007.010106 ISSN 1934-9688 (Print), ISSN 1934-9696 (Online) 76 / PROJECTIONS ent on the balance achieved between its repetitive and reparative functions” (Person 1992: 848). Thus, the lover draws a circle that unites past and present. Circularity is a recurring theme in Julio Medem’s fourth movie, Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Los amantes del circulo polar, 1999).1 Medem, who is recog- nized as one of the pre-eminent exponents of Spanish cinema today, has writ- ten and directed a film of ambitious structure that elucidates the conundrum of “reality” as a “psychic construction.” Two main protagonists narrate the story of their intertwined lives, each from his or her unique perspective, hence offering different accounts of the same moment in time that are colored by their wishes and conflicts. The narrative is cyclical: events recur binding the lives of different characters across generations; time is collapsed as the story is constructed from repeating images that start with the ending and eventu- ally arrive back to the start. Hence, this is a film that, in its very structure, obliges a closer look at its depiction of human experience. The tenacity of the emphasis on circularity that pervades the structure and content of the film has received both praise and criticism. Some critics con- sider it an exercise in cinematographic virtuosity suggestive of the work of Krzysztof Kieslowski. Others object to an unrelenting, even obsessive quality that feels overbearing. “Our director wants, ever so seriously, for us to see pat- terns and symbols and interrelationships. Our lovers’ names, Ana and Otto, are palindromes. In case we hadn’t noticed, we are told so on screen at least twice. Palindromes have a circularity, and circles—Arctic Circle, the circle of fate, and so on—are of concern to Mr. Medem” (Talens 1998). DeLaTorre writes “the entire film is a series of circles embedded in circles, bound together by a tight, intricate web of coincidence, and these circles exist not only in physical space (the Arctic Circle), but also in sequences of events. Otto is named af- ter a German pilot his grandfather saved during World War II, and then him- self becomes a pilot. His stepmother cheats on his father, Alvaro, with another man named Alvaro, whose father is the German pilot for whom Otto is named. The German pilot rents out space in the Arctic Circle to Ana” (1999). Pointing to circularity as a reflection of an underlying “metaphysical sys- tem” that privileges chance and coincidence, Ebert commends Medem’s film as a “strange and haunting movie that wants to be a palindrome” (1999). The movie suggests the arc of life, where characters seem impelled to their des- tiny by fate. Yet, this is but the surface structure, one that belies a deeper psy- chological truth. Embedded in the focus on circularity are issues central to psychic life and to the nature of relationships. Circularity is a symbol that, like a symptom in the clinical context, points us to the exploration of underlying meaning. Ostensibly, this is a movie about passion and loss, longing and frus- tration. As children, the characters are helpless in the face of loss. As young adults, they seem hopelessly isolated as they struggle to make contact with one another. Circularity emphasizes the longing for union and safety, the wish CIRCULARITY IN LOVERS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE / 77 to feel encircled with someone at the center; it also heightens the sense of Medem’s helplessness. The circle comes to represent magic and fate, forces at odds with work offers a initiative and effectance. Medem’s work offers a perspective on central ques- perspective tions about oneness and separateness, and the nature of desire. He draws us into considering what is revealed in his artistic expression that helps to artic- on central ulate our understanding of these issues. questions about The story oneness and Told linearly, the movie is the story of two young latency age children, Otto and Ana, who form an intense lasting bond after a fateful encounter. Otto is separateness, chasing a ball that has rolled outside the school gate. He meets Ana as she is and the running away from her mother who has just conveyed to her the news of her nature of father’s death. Ana is immediately drawn to Otto, and creates the fantasy that desire. he is her father reincarnate. Otto is fascinated by this strange new creature, a girl who is staring intently at him. Much taken with her, he is drawn to write an evocative question about love on paper planes with which he litters the schoolyard. Finding one at dismissal time, Ana gives it to her recently wid- owed mother as a love message from a man she picks out at random from the crowd of parents, Otto’s father. The paper plane message sent by Otto, who himself will later carry love messages as a pilot for an airplane messenger service, sets up the fortuitous encounter between the two parents that leads to their marriage. The children, thus, are brought into a close familial intimacy that culminates in a passionate, sexual love affair in adolescence. Alas, neither union survives the test of time. Otto’s father, who had abandoned his first marriage professing the temporality of love, ends up love sick and broken when Ana’s mother leaves him for another. Otto, who, as a child, had vowed eternal love for his mother when his father deserted them but had, in adoles- cence, left her to actualize a carnal union with Ana, is so overwrought upon his mother’s untimely death that he renounces life with Ana in the throes of his bereavement. The movie traces Otto’s and Ana’s lives into young adulthood, following their trajectory as they aim to regain the experience of their adolescent rela- tionship. As if unable to re-find their love in the context of their commonplace environment, they seek each other in Lapland, that peaceful, idealized land of their adolescent fantasy. Their reunion in the Arctic Circle, the world of the midnight sun where time seems to stand still in a promise of permanence, lasts but a fleeting moment. Otto, who is the namesake of a German soldier who found love in Spain after parachuting from his plane during World War II, attempts to actualize his childhood fantasy and parachutes out of his mes- senger plane near the cabin Ana is renting in the Arctic Circle. Ana reads the news of Otto’s plane crash and, distraught, walks into the path of an oncom- ing bus. Otto rushes to Ana’s side, arriving at the moment of death. He is 78 / PROJECTIONS reflected in her pupils just as they dilate with her last breath. He is, thus, en- circled in her gaze, but their reunion is ephemeral. As if punctuating this point, the background music is a Finnish song about the promise of infinity in the great blue yonder. “Whenever I see the blue sky, I want to climb on its high blue ridge to free myself from my earthly chains . The sky can cast a spell over dreams and hide them so that no one can find them. And there are no miracles. Oh, child of the cold earth.”2 Discussion The movie sets up an expectation that two ends will be brought together, two lives will be united to complete a circle that will recreate a former blissful union. Instead, it portrays union as only a wished-for re-union that can never be, a childhood fantasy forged out of an earlier experience that has been lost and cannot be regained.

Load more

  16

Copy Link